Shopping Traffic: Is Your Site Ready for the Holidays?

Shopping traffic for the holidays is right around the corner. And your business should be ready for more website visitors. With the increase of online shopping rising year over year, companies are doing more website advertising in an effort to increase traffic. And with the rise of targeted traffic vis-à-vis professional social media marketing, every business with a proprietary web presence should be ready for a significant rise in Internet traffic.

Why Traffic to Your Website Means Trouble

It’s always assumed that having more website traffic is a good thing. But if your site isn’t up to the task, it may well crash. Worse yet is people not finding your site–at least if the site can’t handle the load, it’s being found and used.

…retail sales this year will expand by 4.1 percent from last year to a whopping $586.1 billion, and the long Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend [is] expected to top last year’s record $52.4 billion…–San Francisco Chronicle

Of course, those are extremes. But in between are a few elements and functions which have to be present and ready in order to handled a bigger amount of website traffic. Without them in place, your shopping traffic might turn from potential customer to window shopper. And you want the conversions directed by targeted traffic to engage and act.

Being Ready for Shopping Traffic

Search engine optimization is designed to bring more visitors. And to increase web traffic during the holiday season, your site will have to have certain elements in order to turn those visitors into shoppers. Your site’s shopping traffic will be looking for certain things, so make sure it’s delivering:

Get your online promotions ready. Remember, shopping traffic will be 24/7. Have your featured products and/or services front-and-center. In addition, any discounts you’re offering. Specialty coupons are a great way to increase activity. And be sure to have enough inventory on-hand to handle the demand.

Keyword your site now. It takes search engines time to crawl, index and rank new content placed on a site. Don’t miss out on the shopping traffic by not driving targeted traffic to your site. You’ll need to do some research based on last year’s data along with anticipating what will be hot this year.

Make changes where necessary. Put your graphic design skills to work and create a holiday-centric logo. If your site supports or is an e-commerce store, then get your deals, gifts and other incentives ready to go. Create additional pages for specific items to make them more easy to find.

Address any weaknesses your site might have. Shopping traffic tends to peak at the same time during the holiday season. And your hosting, along with your site’s functionality, has to be able to handle those peak occurrences. Make sure you have the bandwidth and your payment processing capabilities to support the increase in views and use.

Talk-up and give visitors a sneak peak. If you send out a newsletter or just email updates, then give your shopping traffic the heads-up. Offering some early deals or “insider deals” is an effective way to increase web traffic.

If you want to make sure your website can handle shopping traffic for the holiday season, contact us. We’ll be happy to evaluate your site and get it ready for more web hits.

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